How to Start an Internet Company That Will Be Noticed: The Proposal and&nbspOutline

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Update 7-29-09: I have decided to put this series on hold for a while. I will continue it once I get more time to experiment with the ideas before recommending them. I am sure both of us can appreciate that :-p Cheers!
This post is a little different than what you might be used to. Instead of talking at you, I would like to talk with you. I would like to propose a blogging outline, not actually blog on the given subject (yet!).

First, allow me to explain myself. I have been under-utilizing my blogging privileges the last three months and I would like to try to make this up to all of you. I have made the same excuses that everyone makes. “I am too busy,” “I’ll get to it later," “My dog ate my keyboard.” I know these are bad excuses (except the last one) and so do you. There are plenty of people who work many more hours than I do (i.e., Rand) and even more people who write excellent blog posts who have less material to work with than me.

The truth is, I love blogging! It is my favorite part of my “job” and quite possibly the aspect that has taught me the most about the internet. Every time I post, I eagerly read the comments and obsessively follow the conversation if it travels around the internet.

Here is the part that involves you.

I would like to write posts only about material that you want to read about. Below is my proposal for you. If you choose not to accept it, I would love to hear your feedback so that I can be led in the right direction.

My Blog Proposal:

You wouldn’t start an offline company without considering marketing, yet many people try to start online companies without considering internet marketing and SEO.

I want to start an internet company and document the entire process from an internet marketing perspective. There are plenty of blogs about about starting a company, but very few (if any) that explain how to do it while solely focusing on internet marketing.

I will not include general start up advice. Instead, I will write as if I am the SEO manager whose only job is to do SEO for the company. To be perfectly honest, I do plan on trying to make money from the company but it is not my main concern. I have acquired a lot of internet marketing knowledge over the past year and I feel like if I don’t start applying it soon, I will explode! This is my effort to stop thinking and start doing.

Blogging Outline:

This is not a definitive plan. It is not tested yet and I plan to try these ideas out and blog about the results. I have only started one company in my life and it ended in a scary legal battle. I do not claim to be even a moderately skilled entrepreneur, but I do have enough SEO skills to make a notable attempt. Below is my plan:

That's all I have for right now. I look forward to hearing your opinions and expertise in the comments. As always, e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. If that's not your style, feel free to contact me on Twitter (DannyDover) and/or Linkedin (Danny Dover). Thanks!

About DannyDover —

Danny Dover is a passionate online marketer, influential writer and obsessed bucket list completer. He is the author of the bestselling book Search Engine Optimization Secrets and the founder of Intriguing Ideas LLC. Before starting his own company, Danny was the Senior SEO Manager at AT&T and the Lead SEO at SEOmoz.org.

I think that this is an excellent experiment and would love to lend my thinking cap to the mix. Here's some additional ideas for blog posts:

- I know that you're playing the role as an SEO manager; however, there are some practical applications of using PPC to test out keywords to make sure that your wishlist of keywords are going to convert. I'd like to see a piece that tests out the keywords using PPC.

- Usability. I know, you're an SEO manager, not a usability expert; however, I think usability and SEO are natural partners.

- Client Management. As an SEO, managing client expectations is one of the biggest challenges we face. I'd like to see some posts devoted to helping clients understand what we do.

- Under Tracking/Analytics, I'd like to see some posts that go past your typical web analytics. There are a lot of good solutions for tracking social media and those deserve their own posts.

1. I use PPC as part of my keyword research, since I often do SEO for Hebrew sites, and the number of keyword research tools that support Hebrew, or have a Hebrew database, is miniscule. I've also found it useful for English language clients who are really set on a few specific keywords, that I don't think are being searched for at all - useful trick to prove them wrong!

2. Usability, or Design. I recently gave a presentation on bad design elements, and how they negatively affect SEO. You can find it at http://tinyurl.com/c2womx (beware - it's a hefty pdf).

3. Biggest problem when trying to close an SEO deal with a small or medium-sized company - managing client expectations. Sometimes the problem is worstened by not managing your own expectations of what you can do for them ... In any case, I try to explain most everything I do for my clients - I want them to trust me, and not think that it's all witchcraft.

4. Tracking and analytics - something that so many webmasters don't understand is part of THEIR job to include, and to explain to the client. Even before you get to the more in-depth stuff, I've heard to many webmasters say "oh, no - that's part of SEO". I try to explain to my clients that tracking is part of knowing what their business is up to.

Short Story: I started a social network (before it was a fad, I might add) and outsourced all of the coding. My hosting company was in Bangladesh and it was majorly damaged by an earthquake.

The data that survived was transferred to a hosting company I had never heard of in LA. They messed up the file permissions (left some writable) and the site was hacked.

The hosting company allegedly needed to replace thousands of dollars worth of hardware due to the breach. They threatened to sue me. I freaked out and had them delete everything (which they couldn't originally because of our contract.)

Result: Danny Dover sad. Mark Zuckerburg rich as hell.

Lesson learned (-;

P.S. I realize the hacking damage does not make sense. But that was the allegation.

I like the mention of the 3 click theory. What I have found a lot of lately is people are getting so obsessed with having a blog and lots of content that the architecture of the structure almost becomes impossible to get the cusomer to the end result you are looking for. I also like the comment about the branding. With the tools out today, you can have a pretty amazing header or design that can really catch the readers eye.

Don't you know clients call and tell you "I launched my site last week and I need SEO". If they did it your way this job would be fun, rewarding, exciting and all the other things WORK is not supposed to be.

Seriously though, you have good food for thought for anyone starting an online business, or deciding to get serious about an existing one before actually building a new site.

Thanks for the hard work. I appreciate the opportunity to benefit from your sharing of well organized thoughts.

Danny - I think this is great.
Since I have so much time on my hands (ha ha ha!), I've started working on a new Internet Company. I'm in the middle of the business plan, and just starting the technical design.
I did have a number of SEO related ideas in mind, of course, but this list ROCKS! I'm definitely going to use it, right now, together with the other plans.
Thanks a million,
Debi-Z

This is an excellent post Danny. I've made a couple of very random posts to my blog, but haven't been overly motivated after working all day writing at work. This post motivates me to sit down and really think it through and provide myself with some good direction.

One last thing I will add to your already thorough list is persona creation of whom I might be attracting to my site. That way I can cater my content to those personas. (My love of personas may also just be my non-traditional brand advertising backgroud shining through!)

Quite honestly, my biggest motivation for doing this post was to get it all out on the web so that I feel pressured to actually write the posts. I had the first version of this list sitting on my computer for months and it wasn't going anywhere.

I feel much better now and I recommend doing the same if possible.

Great comments on adding a persona. People say it is a hard skill to master but is absolutely worth the time. I am adding it to the outline.

P.S. I quickly checked the post to make sure I didn't mess it up! Ignoring the examples in the outline, I passed. Apparently, you tought me well.

Very helpful advice! Those topics tend to be more realted to general internet marketing than SEO and I think that is great. Thanls for opening my mind a little. :-) I am looking forward to learning more and writing about implementing and defining a USP early.

I really look forward to hearing more from you as your idea develops. Personally I was just wondering if you had classified ensuring some sort of "call to action" was implemented in the Interface Design. I personally can understand clickability and so forth, but I think it's important to plan on highlighting the call to action (maybe even in the aesthetic design).

I'm not sure how you would classify that within your structure. I think it's very thorough, but personally I have always been interested in how companies fail to provide a straightforward call-to-action throughout their web pages. Maybe this can be something you can address.

I couldn't agree more. "Call to action" has become an important phrase around the office lately. It is definitely important to internet marketing. (Its no use if the user gets to a given page if they don't know what to do once they get there.)

I do think "How are we going to monetize it" is a very serious question for startups.

I say this because you can build a great platform and not make a profit (youtube, facebook, etc). And the idea of twitter saying 'we are cool for a few years with our VC money' I think this is ridiculous.

Maybe I'm old school (although I'm 21.....) but this assumption 'oh, we'll innovate something' is too generous. I think questions of partnerships, affiliates, and making products should be valid questions.

Having the visitors is one thing but converting them is another ball-game.

Agreed, I was refering to the fact that Google, Del.icio.us and Wikipedia were all nonsense words before they got big. (Although, as you will see in the future post, I am less certian about this strategy now.)